Jyoti Mishra's website

Plans And Apologies at the Rescue Rooms, 12/12/2003

After a rather impromptu journey, I managed to get to Notingham in time to see Plans play one of the best gigs I’ve ever seen them do. They were relaxed (but not completely pissed out of their heads) and the sound, as always in the Rescue Rooms, was brilliant. I could actually hear lyrics! Yay! Which is something to be pleased about with P&A unlike most of the yowling, meaningless, hipper-than-thou cunts who constitute guitar rock.

This band is one of the best bands playing now. They piss all over such indie chancers as the Kings Of Leon, Thrills, etc. and have a sound and identity that’s just theirs. It’s not passed down fifteenth-hand from the NME or just some cringingly retro bollocks like Jet (how fucking bad is that band?) but original and now. The death of rock music is its escape into a past that never existed in the first place.

My fave song they played tonight was a new one called ‘Curry’ something or other (you can see it on the set-list photo). I have no doubt this one song alone will make their names live beyond the end of eternity. Or something.

Locally, P&A have just gone through the yawningly predictable backlash. This is inevitable: as a band becomes briefly fashionable, so they must in turn become unfashionable. Don’t worry about it lads – most of those twats weren’t even listening in the first place.

Anyone with ears can hear that this is a band with a brilliant songwriter but equally importantly a group of musicians who instinctively understand and love that songwriter. You can hear that history in every song, even though they’re still (relatively) foetuses.

And if you think my hyperbole is unwarranted, you couldn’t be more wrong. I know great pop music when I hear it.